Sailors to the End by Gregory A. Freeman

Title: Sailors to the End

Author: Gregory A. Freeman

Length: 307 Pages

Format: Hardback

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published date: 2002

USS Forrestal was an American supercarrier that was launched in 1954 and sailed until 1993, she was scrapped in 2014. She is most famous for the disaster that occurred on 29^th July 1967 during the Vietnam War, when at Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin preparing to launch air strikes against North Vietnam.

The book was published not long after 9/11; in both occurrences the target was a huge structure, in New York’s case a skyscraper, in the Forrestal’s, something akin to a skyscraper lying in the sea. The perpetrator in the former case, a terrorist organisation, in the latter, the damage was self-inflicted. The cause occurred during preparations for a second airstrike on a railway that morning, while pilots were in cockpits in jets in the aft (rear), readying themselves for takeoff. A Zuni rocket, accidentally fired from a Phantom, shot across the deck, into a Skyhawk. The resultant explosion leaked fuel which ignited causing a deadly chain reaction. Old, unwanted WWII-era Composition B bombs, yet offloaded by the supply ship Diamond Head, which were to be gotten ridden of during the raid, fell off wings onto the flightdeck, they prematurely ‘cooked off’ and their detonation punched a fuel-dripping hole through the steel. All the right ingredients for a toxic inferno were present: oxygen, magnesium, jet fuel, TNT, RDX and even water on which the jet fuel could travel forced the ship into condition Zebra and narrowly avoided sinking.

It would seem that safety precautions had been lax, but this wasn’t especially the case. An aircraft carrier is a dangerous working environment and those in charge were veterans who understood, at first hand, the dangers. There were protests at carrying the lethal ordinance; what acted as the main scapegoat was that there were two preventative measures to stop the accidental launching of missiles, which had both been overlooked in the need to take off quickly. A power surge caused when switching systems on board the Phantom acted as the trigger.

Greg Freeman incorporates the stories and backgrounds of the real people who fought and died saving their ship. The 5000+ officers and sailors had the advantage of fighting away from the jungle. We’re introduced to Bob Shelton, who suffered from precognitive nightmares leading up to the disaster. He was from Texas and liked iced tea, while James Blaskis with whom he shared duties, grew up in a different cooler climate in Ohio. There was Paul Friedman the Jewish surfer from Rockaway Beach and Ed Roberts of Atlanta who cut short both his drumming career in The Fugitives and hair to don a blue shirt on the flight deck moving planes. John Beling, the captain was an ex-war aviator who flew a two-seater bomber over the Micronesian lagoon island, Yap and experienced burns when he was shot down. Merv Rowland, a senior officer, originally with a rich background in North Carolina, who before excelling in his navy career, hitch-hiked with a friend and worked in mines during the depression. The pilots of the Phantoms and Skyhawks included John McCain, Dave Dollarhide and Fred White. Their experiences, in some cases their last, were nightmarish as the death toll rose to 134.

The book comprises descriptions of the voyage to Yankee Station, the critical moments of the launching of the Zuni rocket, the premature explosions of the Composition B bombs, the fires and deaths both on and below decks, the assistance of nearby ships, the escape attempts of those involved, the controlling of the blaze and the investigation and its findings. Captain Beling had to work until his retirement in an office in Iceland and the US navy made changes to safety procedures and equipment design based on the findings of the report.

Pursuit The Sinking of the Bismark by Ludovic Kennedy

Pursuit The Sinking of the Bismark by Ludovic Kennedy

Title: Pursuit: The Sinking of the Bismark

Author: Ludovic Kennedy

Length: 252 Pages

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Fontana Press

Published date: 1975

When I was a lad, my 1975 Victor annual had pictures of famous battleships. The book’s inner binding had pictures of famous ironclads. The German battleship, Tirpitz, stood out like a diamond, a water-borne castle, bristling with armour and technological sophistication. It reinforced in my mind the brilliance of the Nazi war machine compared to others such as the ancient hulks of the Battle of Jutland. Tirpitz was a Bismarck class ship, one of the two of the largest and powerful battleships in the world, the other was, of course: the Bismarck.

Launched in 1939 in Hamburg, the Bismarck was an emblem of a confident nation. After initial tests it was sent with the cruiser, Prinz Eugen, to harry allied shipping in the Atlantic. During its voyage through the Baltic it was spotted by a pro-British spy network from Sweden which quickly alerted Bletchley Park of its position. The RAF and Royal Navy attempted to track the course of the two warships. They eventually met in the Denmark Straits, west of Iceland.

During this engagement the power of the ship was felt to Britain’s cost. With its pinpoint accurate range finding, it quickly located the HMS Hood, which it utterly destroyed from about 10 miles, a huge explosion went skywards and the ship broke into two. The contrasting jubilation and dread were immediately felt by each side. The Bismarck had suffered damage, though, and being low on fuel it headed to Brest in France for repairs. It split with the Prinz Eugen not long after.

On a continuously zig-zagging course, Bismarck evaded a seemingly desperate hunt by the Royal Navy. Yet with only obsolete Swordfish biplanes, launched by the Ark Royal, a torpedo knocked out its rudder, leaving the Bismarck listless in the open sea. Ludovic Kennedy, the author, who was a veteran of the battle, gives an impression of the great ship, like a gigantic wounded tiger as it waited in the darkness for its inevitable fate, it was now surrounded by the King George V, Rodney, Norfolk, Piorun (Poland), Prince of Wales and Dorsetshire. During the next few hours they pounded the ship until it was aflame, despite each having to ditch out of the way of the Bismarck’s range finding and deadly salvoes. It was eventually sunk by torpedoes hit on each of its flanks, launched from the Dorsetshire.

The retelling of this story reminds me of the Titanic; the unsinkable pride of a nation. Yet you can only feel pity for the thousands on both sides who perished during the conflict.

The Trojan War by Barry Strauss

The Trojan War by Barry Strauss

Title: The Trojan War

Author: Barry Strauss

Length: 258 Pages

Format: Hardback

Publisher: Hutchinson

Published date: 2007

Homer’s epic The Iliad depicts an episode from the Trojan War set in Bronze Age Turkey. But how much of this was fact? Who were the leaders of that age, and what constituted the Western Mediterranean with places and people like Sparta, Troy, the Achaeans, the Hittites, and the Troad? Barry Strauss investigates these questions and unravels the saga of King Menelaus’ wife Helen who ran off with Paris to Troy with his treasury. This spurned the massing of a huge fleet of rowed black-sailed warships by Agamemnon, against the auspices, to cross the Aegean for Troy. The Trojans had no navy but a great allied land army with horses and chariots to defend itself. Barry Strauss speculates on where the great landing took place and pieces the combat together from his sources. The assailants gained their landing, the defenders, meanwhile, retreated to Troy. Greek heroes like Ajax and Achilles took part, whose presence protected their beachhead for a further nine years. The conquests of Achilles in sieging cities outside of Troy, and the difficulties the Greeks had in laying siege to the main city are described at length.

The war raged on the plains of Troy, at first confident Hector seemed to be gaining victory. While the Greek camp reeked of the odour of charred corpses decimated by plague, Agamemnon almost caused a mass retreat, while trying to spurn on his heroes, his test to return to Greece didn’t rally his troops, but created panic. Hector’s men pursued them to their ships, which only enraged Achilles. The Greeks rallied and the war fell into their favour. Achilles killed Hector, Paris killed Achilles. The drama was brought to it’s final conclusion with the famous Trojan Horse which moved five key soldiers inside Troy; Troy was razed to the ground.

The book retells the story with many references to the Iliad. It illustrates the difficulty and scale of the war; something that we see in modern times about how military campaigns are won and lost.

The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss

The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss

Title: The Spartacus War

Author: Barry Strauss

Length: 240 Pages

Format: Hardback

Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Published date: 2009

ISBN-13: 978-0297852674

In 73BC a small group of gladiators broke out of the Ludus of Vatia in Capua in a bid for freedom from inevitable death in the arena. They were led by ex-Roman auxiliary and more recently gladiator, the Thracian Spartacus. The group consisted of Thracians, Germans and Celts. His woman was a prophetess of the mystical and renegade cult of Dionysus. They exchanged their initial armoury of kitchen utensils with stolen soldiers weapons and headed for the slopes and summit of Vesuvius where they gathered, attracting other slaves to join their band. They made their way southwards down the Italian peninsular travelling by night in the woods and mountains, their numbers grew exponentially to anything from 60,000 to 120,000. They encountered and destroyed every Roman legion set against them, due to their training and the guile of their leader. They broke up, those not with Spartacus were destroyed, those who stayed formed a formidable slave army which marched northwards to the Alps, then when they found them to be impassable, they again marched south eventually being stopped the opportunity to escape to Sicily either by bad luck in securing maritime transport or having been tricked by pirate escorts. Despite these setbacks they were invincible and a threat to the Roman Republic who after making flimsy attempts to halt the rebels in their tracks, appointed the cruel yet competent Marcus Crassus who rebuilt his Roman army on unforgiving discipline, such as when he had every 10^th man in a group of deserters beaten to death by his comrades. Crassus, using his experience of encircling sieged towns by walls which caused their inhabitants to starve, tried to fence Spartacus into the toe of Italy by building a wall from sea to sea. But after the Thracian broke through the trap, his army split again, again those not following their commander were destroyed. By this time Crassus’ army had outnumbered that of his rival who was eventually killed in battle. In this final showdown, Spartacus sacrificed his horse as a gesture to invoke loyalty and fought on the front line with the intention of engaging Crassus in a one-to-one contest. This was not to be, the Roman legions massacred the rebels, the 6,000 who were captured were crucified on the road from Capua to Rome.

Stories of war such as this are often very moving or even inspiring. The book is very much like the 1960 Hollywood epic starring Kirk Douglas. The author makes it clear that some of the sources are patchy. Nevertheless it makes a great tale, enough to inspire not only Stanley Kubrick but the main advocates of the Russian Revolution such as Marx, Lenin and Stalin, before him. What makes it so remarkable was the strength and generalship of Spartacus, but the disappointment of not actually being able to escape via the Alps or by sea to Sicily. The characters of Spartacus and Crassus make great contrasting adversaries. The Spartacus War was a key to the formation of the Empire; the Roman establishment needed a more authoritarian government to save itself.

The Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius

The Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius

Title: The Twelve Caesars

Author: Gaius Suetonius, translated by Robert Graves

Length: 315 Pages

Format: Paperback

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Published date: 1957

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (born approx. 69 AD), friend of Pliny the Younger, was a historian, this, his most famous work covering the lives of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.

Gaius Julius Caesar (100BC-44BC) was a famous general and consul, founding Imperial Rome. Though in his earlier career that of Alexander had outshone his, the next few years showed that as a remarkable and athletic soldier and his military successes in Gaul, Germany and Britain gave him a standing that allowed him to enter Italy across the River Rubicon against the ruling of the Senate. He crushed the ensuing civil war, and became dictator, his acts including the establishment of the modern Julian calendar. Though his career was colourful as virtual sole ruler of Europe and the Mediterranean, his success eventually gave birth to the scorn of sixty conspirators who stabbed him to death on the Ides of March. The story that Seutonius gives shows the athlete who would regularly swim rivers on campaign, keep a string of lovers and heap rewards on his loyal legions. He invaded Britain in search of pearls, his entourage included slabs of mosaic paving and he had mystical visions before Rubicon and his death.

The reign of Gaius Octavius Augustus (63BC-14AD) was initiated by the death of Caesar, the pursuit of his assassins and the formation of the triumvirate (Augustus, Antony and Lepidus). Foreign affairs involved containing Caesar’s conquered lands and Antony’s defeat at  Philippi. In the main, Augustus’ rule was dominated by the establishment and improvement of domestic policy especially in regards to civic and legal developments.

Tiberius Claudius Nero (42BC-37AD), or Tiberius, as he was known, was successful militarily but infamous for his cruelty and sadism, so much so that Roman citizens celebrated on hearing about his death. There then followed the short reign of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus or ‘Caligula’(37AD – 41AD), whose murderous and cruel perversions exceeded even those of his predecessor, it was rumoured that with his own hand murdered Tiberius himself, removing the ring from his finger while still breathing and suffocating him with a pillow. His reign was excessively cruel, incestuous and adulterous, Caligula, his wife and daughter were eventually assassinated by soldiers.

Claudius (10BC-54AD) was a great builder and administrator, but his successor Nero (37-68AD) was a cruel and bloodthirsty maniac who had an incestuous relationship with his mother, Agrippina, and then, after many unsuccessful attempts, had her murdered. With the suicide of Nero came the end of the blood-line of the Julio-Claudians. The year of the four emperors: Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian, ended by the latter who was the first of the Flavian dynasty, which also included Titus and Domitian.

The lives of these men are very colourful, to say the least, when reading you have to question whether all of what is written is actually true; if it is, it is difficult to understand how the Roman Empire survived. Was Suetonius prone to exaggeration, an honest scribe or a speaking on behalf of a biased sponsor?  As depicted here, Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, are just murderers in power; although Rome had its senate and was no doubt a highly developed civilization, their stories are merely tales of excess, incest and complete disregard for human life. They were the descendants of the more heroic Julius Caesar and Augustus (or Octavian) who, despite the assassination of the former, were men who strove for the glory of their state. Of the twelve Caesars, only three died of natural causes, Nero and Otho committed suicide, the others were murdered. Looking at a contemporary situation, Jesus Christ and some of the early disciples were also assassinated. Perhaps, this was more of a sign of their times. Many of the portraits that Seutonius gives, though, are very believable, although Romans were more superstitious and militaristic, they could be people of today.